our CVs

Ari Rabl

Dr. Rabl was (until his retirement in 2007, obligatory at 65) Senior Scientist at the Centre Energétique et Procédés of the Ecole des Mines in Paris. He is continuing as consultant for government and industry, and in particular for the Ecole des Mines in collaboration with his old colleagues of the Centre Energétique et Procédés.

He received a PhD in physics from Berkeley, and worked at Argonne National Laboratory and at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. From 1980 to 1989 he was Research Scientist and Lecturer at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies of Princeton University. He has published about 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals or books, and a comparable number of conference presentations, as well as ten patents. He is the author of the book Active Solar Collectors and Their Applications and co-author of the book Heating and Cooling of Buildings: Design for Efficiency. He has coordinated several multinational research projects of the EC. He is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology, the Federation of American Scientists, and the American Physical Society.

After many years of research on energy (especially solar energy and energy conservation), since 1992 the focus of his work has shifted to the assessment of environmental impacts. His research concerns the methodology for the quantification of environmental damages and costs (“external costs”) as well as their application, in particular to energy, transport and waste treatment.

For this work which is extremely multidisciplinary he benefits from a broad professional experience and from numerous contacts and collaborations with colleagues in disciplines such as atmospheric modeling, epidemiology and environmental economics (as can be seen from the list of his publications). In particular he collaborated, until her death in 2006, with his wife Brigitte Desaigues who was professor at the Sorbonne with specialty of environmental economics.

In 2008 he received the Frank Kreith Energy Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Has carried out basic research on energy analysis in the residential and commercial building sectors (performance analysis and equipment modeling) and assessment of environmental impacts and damage costs of electricity generation and use, disposal (management) of waste residues and road transport.

Has been a member of the core team of principal investigators involved in the ExternE Project series (European Commission), and has acted as expert consultant in various projects supported by international organizations (EEA, UNEP-SETAC Life-Cycle Initiative, UN-ECLAC, IAEA), national governments and private industry. Mr. Spadaro is a work-package leader in the PURGE Project, 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. Research has focused on analysis of air/water/soil (multimedia) pollutant transport modeling, health risk assessment and uncertainty analysis, cost-benefit analysis of private sector decisions and environmental legislation, life-cycle based economic–environmental assessment and evaluation of co-benefits of climate change mitigation measures at the urban scale.

Further interests: (i) long-term energy alternative planning strategies, (ii) assessment of adaptation measures and policy options for addressing climate change and health vulnerability at the urban scale, (iii) multi-criteria analysis in reaching stakeholder consensus on environmental actions (consultant on prioritization of air quality improvement measures for the city of Lima, Peru’) and (iv) consumer behavior and green economy.

He has developed RiskPoll, an integrated multimedia risk assessment computer tool that implements a set of “simplified” methodologies for quantifying and valuing impacts to public health, agricultural crops and building materials from exposure to routine emissions of classical pollutants, toxic metals and certain organic species. RiskPoll results are capable of providing robust guidance in decision-taking by private industry stakeholders or for policymaking decisions at the local, national or regional level. SIMPACTS, a variant of RiskPoll, is disseminated by the IAEA to its member states.

Brigitte Desaigues was professor of business administration and Director of the LASI (Laboratoire de Stratégie Industrielle) at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne until her death in 2006. She was also General Secretary and member of the Editorial Board of the Revue d’Economie Politique. Her speciality was environmental economics and she was one of the participants in the ExternE project series. She obtained her doctorate from Université Paris 1 in 1977 and has also taught at Université Bordeaux I. She published three books on environmental economics: